It's time for parents and students to stop viewing high school as an extension of childhood. As college becomes unaffordable to more and more young people, better use needs to be made of tax-supported educational opportunities.

Millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs go unfilled for lack of qualified applicants. Children acquire an adult work ethic by suffering consequences for not working as well as they can while they are in school.

In 2002, NCLB promised that by 2014, 100% of U.S. school children would demonstrate “proficiency” in reading and math. On the NAEP test in 2012, 40% of fourth-graders scored at proficiency or above in math, and 32% scored proficiency in reading. Going by NAEP results, NCLB won't make the deadline.

Every state is permitted by law to define "reading proficiency" according to their own guidelines. As a result, states often rate their children at a higher level of proficiency than the NAEP does. Parents must adopt their own guidelines and test their children themselves.

K-6 teachers have a far greater influence on the future of their pupils than do high school teachers. They can mean the difference between success or failure in the upper grades. They deserve the best possible teacher preparation.

Professional educators in control of teacher preparation concern themselves more with theory than with the practical considerations of teaching real children in real school settings. A first step in meaningful education reform would be to break the stranglehold of university education departments.

Parents of young children do not have the luxury of waiting for professional educators to agree on what to do about reading failure. They need to use the time from birth to age five to prepare their children for reading success.

Efforts to improve the academic quality of U.S. public schools continue to fail because legislation that ties everything to standardized test scores and makes scapegoats of teachers is totally out of touch with the reality of U.S. culture.